It is known to provide a vehicle-based transmitting unit or device for actuating a garage door opening mechanism at a garage for opening a garage door at the vehicle owner's home. Examples of vehicle-based garage door opening devices are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,556,681; 6,525,645; 6,396,408; 6,362,771; 5,798,688 and 5,479,155, and in U.S. Publication No. US 2003/0112121 A1, published Jun. 19, 2003, which are hereby incorporated herein by reference. Often, such vehicle-based transmitting units are learnable or trainable and must be “taught” the correct radio frequency (RF) and code for actuating the respective garage door opening mechanism at the home. The units may be trainable to learn the frequencies and codes of many garage door opening mechanisms available today, which may comprise rolling codes to provide enhanced security of the system and to reduce the ability of someone else to open the garage door with another remote or hand held garage door opener transmitting unit or device. An example of such a trainable device is a Homelink® device, commercially available from Johnson Controls, Inc., and such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,479,155, incorporated by reference above. Another example of such a trainable device is a Kwiklink™ device, which also includes a trainable unit that in this case is located in the garage.
Because the trainable transmitting unit must be trained or set to communicate with a receiver of the garage door opening mechanism, the trainable transmitting unit or device thus includes a receiver or receiving device and costly and complex learning or training circuitry, logic circuitry and/or processing circuitry and/or algorithms so that the trainable transmitting device may receive and learn the appropriate frequency and code or codes so as to selectively transmit the appropriate frequency and code or codes for the garage door opening mechanism at the garage. The training or learning process may be accomplished by actuating the domestic hand held garage door opener transmitting unit (that typically is purchased by the home owner with the garage door opener or garage door opening mechanism) while the trainable transmitting unit is in the training mode, whereby the trainable transmitting device learns the correct code for actuating the particular garage door opening mechanism to open the particular garage door. Typically, in order to train the trainable transmitting units for use with rolling code garage door opening mechanisms, the homeowner must also press a button or the like at the garage door opening mechanism in the garage during the training process. This often requires the homeowner to climb a ladder to reach the garage door opening mechanism and may thus be awkward and time consuming to accomplish. Often, after the trainable transmitting unit is trained, the home owner may misplace or lose the domestic hand held garage door opener transmitting unit, since it is no longer used or needed to actuate the garage door opening mechanism to open the garage door.
It has been proposed to limit or avoid training of the vehicle-based garage door opening system by providing a vehicle-based transmitting unit and a remote actuating device for actuating a domestic hand held garage door opener transmitting unit, such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,362,771, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference. Although such a system works well for its intended purpose, it would be desirable to provide a system where the transmitting unit may utilize transmitting circuitry and codes associated with other accessories or systems or components of the vehicle.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a garage door opening system which utilizes a vehicle-based transmitting unit and which overcomes the shortcomings of the prior art. There is also a need in the art for a vehicle-based garage door opening system which allows a vehicle owner to acquire and apply a vehicle-based transmitting unit associated with the vehicle and operable to transmit a signal to open or close a garage door, without requiring training of the transmitting unit and without requiring the associated costly training circuitry in the transmitting unit.